


Quantum Entanglement

by killer_quean



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killer_quean/pseuds/killer_quean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guinan and Ro Laren's friendship: across timelines, worlds, and depths of memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quantum Entanglement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [metatxt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/metatxt/gifts).



(1)

This time, they're in Ten Forward when Guinan says it.

"I've been to Bajor, you know."

She hasn't wanted to bring it up until now-- she's never wanted to burden Ro with the unfairness of it, that Guinan had memories of a Bajor that Ro could only ever imagine and mourn. But being a child with Ro, even for just a day, had shown her something else: sometimes, despite her insistence to the contrary, she likes to remember the past. She holds onto the memory of small pleasures she was able to eke out of nothing.

"And?" Ro raises an eyebrow.

"It was a long time ago." She smiles. "But I still remember the hasperat. My replicator's never been able to get it right."

"That's what you remember?" snaps Ro.

"If I'm not mistaken, you agree with me about replicated hasperat," replies Guinan.

Ro smiles. “I’m just saying that if I had centuries to spend listening to the galaxy, I think I’d do more than just collect recipes."

Guinan looks out at the stars. "I rode in a lightship. I wish I could do that again. It's rare that the universe feels silent to me, but in a ship like that--"

"I'm sorry, but when I heard about Bajor growing up, silence wasn't exactly the word that tended to come up."

Guinan nods. "I think about that. How much of what I saw is gone now."

"When was it?" asks Ro quietly.

"Six hundred years ago," says Guinan. "Give or take. I lived in a monastery for a while. Spent some time farming. But then I followed a friend to the city. She was an engineer. And that's how I ended up on a lightship, listening to the stars."

"Very poetic."

"Well, it's never pure poetry," Guinan admits. "My friend--she was an engineer, and a damn good one, but if she'd been the right caste, she would have been a vedek. I think… I think building ships was how she tried to feel closer to the Prophets.”

“You sound like a very proper Bajoran,” says Ro with a hint of sarcasm. “Guinan, why are you telling me all this? Why now?” she asks.

“I was young then,” says Guinan. “There was a lot I didn’t understand yet. There was no Federation— no hints that any of this would exist. I’d never even heard of Earth.”

“And?”

“Well… I knew I was learning something, out there in the lightship, and on the farm. But I think I didn’t know why I was learning it until just now.”

 

\--

(2)

Another time--if it really happened--they were in the brig. That is, Ro was, or at least, Guinan remembered her having been there, but all her memories seemed wrong, like the harsh light in Ten Forward and a galaxy at war. Past, present, all of it was plastered hastily over whatever the universe should have been instead. And yet the conversation persisted stubbornly in her memory, alongside the vast patchwork of life and memory she'd listened to for centuries.

"I've been to Bajor, you know," she said, through the force field, to the Bajoran pilot they'd captured after her attack on a Federation weapons depot.

“Is that how you’re planning to interrogate me?” replied Ro, refusing to look up.

“No.” Guinan stood still and waited. She waited a long time, or at least, what was probably a long time for the Bajoran woman.

“Hey!” Ro finally looked up. “Why were you there? On Bajor?”

“I was there to learn.”

“Learn?” sneered Ro. “What did you expect to learn there? I didn’t realize the Cardassians ran such a lucrative tourism business in their spare time.”

“I was young then,” said Guinan. “There was a lot I didn’t understand yet.”

“And this is why we couldn’t wait around for the Federation to learn,” snapped Ro. “Bajor was occupied for over thirty years. With our help, the Klingons destroyed the Cardassian Empire. Meanwhile, the Federation was only offering a few worthless treaties. Who do you expect we’d fight for now?”

“Either way, though,” replied Guinan slowly. “Neither option would have brought back your father.”

“How did you know that?” hissed Ro.

“I—“ Guinan wavered in her composure, just for a moment. “I listen. I hear a lot of things. I heard that from a friend.”

Silence.

Finally, Ro’s face softened as she looked up again at Guinan. “You’re older than you look, aren’t you?”

Guinan smiled. “You could say that.”

“When were you on Bajor? It must have been before the war.”

“Yes,” said Guinan.

“I grew up in a refugee camp,” said Ro. “My parents never knew anything but the Occupation. And ever since then, we’ve been at war. Enlisted in the militia when I was eighteen. I guess— I don’t see Bajor as anywhere that anyone would want to visit. Hasn’t been for a very, very long time.”

“I remember the hasperat,” said Guinan. “Rations sure can’t compare.”

“Well, if I could travel around learning,” replied Ro, “I think I’d do more than just collect recipes.” Guinan thought she saw a hint of a smile, just before the guards came in and took the prisoner to be transported off the Enterprise.

“Nice talking to you,” said Ro over her shoulder as they led her out.

And now it’s been six months since that conversation, or at least, that’s what Guinan’s memory tells her, despite the doubt she can’t quite shake. And it’s been six months since she’d heard that Ro Laren had been sent to a prison colony for life, but the news hits her now as if for the first time, as if she’s losing a friend.

It strengthens her resolve, somehow, to think of Ro Laren, who should have lived a different life, as she steps into the darkness of the bridge. Another Enterprise is out there, drifting across the viewscreen. She walks up to Picard and tells him: this is not how things are supposed to be.

 

\--

(3)

Another: Guinan knows the sensation well— that sense of another reality pressing its skin against her own. It’s just something you learn to listen for. Most of them teach her something. She listens to it and moves on, understanding a little more each time just where and how the quantum possibilities of the universe branch and converge.

But there’s one she doesn’t like to feel brushing by her. It’s a ghost she’s had to live with for almost eighty years.

Tonight she’s tending bar when it surfaces. The new Bajoran, Ensign Ro, comes in and sits down, alone, and Guinan knows it right away: if it had happened, eighty years ago, they still would have met.

(Not as themselves— not precisely. But what would have been left of them.)

The dispersed intelligence she would have been, in that other order of things, would have mingled its centuries-old memories—the image of a lightship, the silence between the stars—into the Collective, along filaments of nerve and wire, resolving unimaginable depth and detail into a single desire: this uniqueness will become a part of our own. Bajor is worthy of assimilation.

And something that would have been long since released from the singularity of a name or a body would still have retained a faint hint of what had once been Guinan’s. The whole Collective would have relished the taste of so many new memories and sensations as Ro Laren would have dispersed her gifts among them. The Collective would have listened.

Geordi knows the look, even if he can’t fully understand what it means, and so he pulls Guinan out of the thrall of it. She smiles at him as the way things are fall back into place. He tells her about the new Ensign and what the crew say about her.  
“She doesn’t belong here,” he says. Guinan smiles. No, she thinks to herself. Ro Laren is precisely where she belongs.

She excuses herself from her conversation with Geordi and sits down with Ensign Ro. The past and the future are suspended. Between everything that could have been and everything that could yet be, the universe is too chaotic to keep promises. But here and now, at least, there's space for some certainties.

"I'm Guinan. I tend bar, and I listen."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for a thoughtful and exciting prompt! I, too, love the friendship between these characters, and I am also endlessly curious about Guinan's backstory. And so this turned into an exploration of what it really means to perceive alternate timelines, and what friendship looks like amidst so much suspended possibility. (It also turned into a shameless attempt to retcon Ro Laren into "Yesterday's Enterprise," because I couldn't resist!) I hope you like it.


End file.
